It could be scenes from a horror film or a story by Stephen King: In the Internet chat, a deceased friend suddenly reports back with his typical, unmistakable jokes. The voice of the dead grandmother, who wants to read her grandson a bedtime story, sounds from the smart speaker. But this resurrection of dead spirits does not spring from literary imagination, but is made possible by current AI technology.
On the other hand, it is questionable whether it is beautiful dreams that come true here – or nightmares. At the conference HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) has the researcher at the Swedish Lund University Stefan Larsson therefore now proposed such “resurrection technologies” under the title Necrorobotics to be examined more closely and critically examined.
Golden Era of AI?
The chatbot, which reconstructs the speech of a “specific person” from “social data” such as images, voice recordings, electronic messages or other text, was developed by Microsoft and supported by the US-Patent US 10,853,717 B2 secured. And the otherworldly voice of the grandmother was recognized last summer by Amazon Vice President Rohit Prasad new feature for the language assistant Alexa presents. Less than a minute of recorded speech was enough to reconstruct the voice of the deceased, Prasad explained, adding: “We are undoubtedly living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fiction become reality.”
According to Larsson, it is foreseeable that these technologies will not only be limited to the voices and ways of speaking of deceased people, but that the dead will soon also be able to be reanimated in video recordings – as in the case of the Korean Jang Ji-sung, who was able to re-encounter her late 7-year-old daughter Na-Yeon in virtual reality. While it is probably ethical for a mother to virtually resurrect her own child, the fundamental question is who is entitled to such an act. The unanswered questions also included how to deal with the data of the deceased: Who does it belong to? How can they be protected from unauthorized access? Last but not least, it is also conceivable that the resurrection technologies could be misused, for example by frightening and tormenting the bereaved with the spirits of the dead.
The new technologies added to a long history of mourning and commemorating the dead, Larsson explains, but also marked a culmination of those traditions in some ways. It is therefore necessary to follow technical developments closely and deal with normative issues.
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